PANEL CRITICIZES C.I.A. FOR FAILURE ON IRAQ WEAPONS

By DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE; David Johnston and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.

Published: March 29, 2005

The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.

Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror. [Page A14.]

The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called ''a hearty condemnation'' of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version.

In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, ''we don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don't,'' referring to the North Korean leader and Iran's clerical leaders.

Mr. Bush is expected to receive the report officially on Thursday.

As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed.

After Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program -- which had not produced a weapon -- along with biological agents and chemical weapons. Much of the flawed intelligence was based on a series of assumptions that Mr. Hussein reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998.

But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power.

The discovery of the false assumptions forced Mr. Bush to appoint, somewhat reluctantly, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has operated largely in secret under the direction of Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor Charles S. Robb of Virginia.

According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a ''case study'' of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House's behest -- in a hurried few weeks -- in 2002.

After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories.

The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of ''unmanned aerial vehicles,'' which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the ''mobile laboratories'' were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view.

One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a "vortex of corruption.'' Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein's scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality.

One defense official who had been briefed on an early draft of the report said Monday that one of its conclusions was that ''human intelligence left a lot to be desired'' in the global war against terror.